The women made a chain, passing slopping pails, cans, pots from hand to hand up the shore, children darting back through the rubbish with the empties so Savine could take them and fill them again, clatter, gurgle, slop and trickle.
On the other side of the river, mills were burning, flames towering into the night, the great chimneys black fingers against the brilliance, their reflections wriggling in the slow-flowing water. Burning things drifted from the sky into the streets, onto the beach, into the river, little flaming birds that sputtered and popped, dancing lights floating on the black mirror for a moment before they were gone.
Up among the burning buildings, at the end of the chain of buckets, men struggled with the fires, shouting, bellowing, yelling at one another. Anger, maybe. Desperation, maybe. Encouragement, maybe. Savine was too tired to tell the difference. So tired she could hardly remember how to speak. How to think. She had become a machine herself. A machine for filling buckets. What would her important connections at the Solar Society think if they could see her now? She gave a weary snort that caught in her throat and nearly made her retch. Serve the arrogant bitch right, more than likely.
The clatter of the handle, the gurgle of water as it filled, the slop and trickle as she passed it to May, her legs, her arms, her shoulders trembling with the effort. Was it the cold, or the exhaustion, or the fear that made her shake so? What was the difference?
Her breath snagged and she was caught with a coughing fit, sudden as a punch in the gut. She doubled up, wasted ribcage buzzing with each choking gasp, tore the rag from her face and was sick. All she had to be sick with, anyway, bitter bile and bad water, her own little contribution to the river’s filth.
She wrested back control of her lungs, then stooped to fill the bucket. Clatter, gurgle, slop and trickle—
There was a hand on her shoulder. Liddy. “It’s out,” she said.
Savine stared dumbly at her, then up the bank towards the buildings. Smoke still rolled skywards, but the flames were gone. She waded from the river and flopped on the slimy shingle on her hands and knees, utterly spent. She arched her back, one way then the other, aches stabbing right through into her heels, right up into her neck. The faintest shadow of what her father felt, perhaps, every morning. Maybe it should have given her sympathy for him. But as he was so fond of saying, pain only makes you sorry for yourself.
“It’s out,” rasped May, sinking down on the shore beside her.
Savine groaned as she came up to sitting, winced as she tried to work her fingers, cracked and wrinkled by cold water, ripped raw by the rusted handles of the buckets.
“It’s out over here,” she whispered, staring across to the great blaze still raging on the far bank.
“All we can worry about is here. Over there…” The orange glow of the fires across the river picked up the hollows of Liddy’s face even more starkly than usual. Savine understood. Over there was lost. Over there was gone.
When she arrived in the city, she had smiled to see the building sites everywhere, the cranes and scaffolds, the stuff of creation. But Valbeck was one vast demolition now.
She caught some fragment of her mind trying to calculate the scale of the investments gone up in smoke. The buildings and machinery destroyed, the people ruined. What were her own losses, for that matter? None of it felt very important, compared to the pain in her hands.
There was a breeze, at least, carrying the haze of smoke down the river. Enough that Savine could get a proper breath into her raw chest.
“What happened?” she whispered.
“Reckon the Burners set some fires on their way out of town.” Liddy wiped her face on the back of her sleeve and only succeeded in smearing ash across it. “A little parting gift.”
“Their way out?”
May ran her tongue around the inside of her mouth and spat. “They say the crown prince is coming with five thousand soldiers. Rumour is they’ll be outside the city tomorrow.”
“Orso is here?” she whispered. She had hardly thought of him since the uprising. Hunger, cold and the constant threat of death rather blunted one’s appetite for romance. Now his grin came up in her memory, painfully sharp, and she felt weak with a sappy welling of relief.
“Guess they managed to prise him out of the whorehouse,” said Liddy. “No doubt he’ll be bringing the Inquisition with him.”
“Oh,” said Savine, stupidly. For most people here, a horrifying prospect. For her, the best news in weeks.
“Seems the party’s over,” murmured May.
There was a rumble and Savine jerked up. On the other side of the river, the roof of a burning mill was falling in, fountains of sparks towering into the night, smoke boiling as half of one wall toppled inwards. The brave new age collapsing on itself.
Crown Prince Orso was riding to her rescue. Perhaps she should have laughed at that. Perhaps she should have wept at it. But she had no laughter and no tears left. She was a husk.
She sat on the bank and watched the flames dance in the water.
Eating Peas with a Sword
“Should we attack, Your Highness?”
“Attack, Colonel Forest?” Orso did not blame the man. Violence is very much the job of a career soldier, after all. But the limits of his imagination were becoming clear. “Attack who? The city itself is an asset, not an enemy. As for the inhabitants, we really have no idea who is loyal and who disloyal. Who a rebel and who a hostage. Making war on our own citizens… it would look dreadful. We would create more rebels than we killed.”
Orso peered through his eyeglass towards Valbeck again. He could see tiny buildings, towers, pinprick chimneys, dark columns rising from the stricken city that he feared was the smoke of destruction rather than of industry.
How he would have loved to order a glorious charge. To put rebels to the sword, to root through every house until he found Savine. To whisk her off her feet and kiss her fiercely and so on, much to her great delight. To be, for once, the one to rush to her rescue. But Orso knew he had to put the children’s stories to one side and think.
She was tough. A great deal tougher than he was. She was resourceful. A great deal more resourceful than he was. Her best chance—everyone’s best chance—was for him to move slowly, cautiously and very, very boringly. He blew a sigh from puffed cheeks, itchy with the beginnings of a beard he hoped might look military but suspected would prove to be another of his many mistakes.
“Attacking the city with an army would be like eating peas with a sword,” he said. “Messy, frustrating and you’ve a good chance of stabbing yourself in the face. We need to be measured. Calm. The firm but necessary hand of authority. We need to be the grown-ups.” For once in his life.
Orso snapped his eyeglass decisively closed. Vital to look decisive, especially when you haven’t a bloody clue what you’re doing. He had been making it up as he went along all his life, of course, but never before had the fates of many thousands of other people depended so directly on his total ignorance. Perhaps that’s what makes a hero, though. The towering self-confidence to dance at the brink of disaster and never consider the drop.
“Surround the city,” he said, tapping the eyeglass thoughtfully into his palm and letting his eyes wander across the fields around Valbeck. “Deploy our cannons where they can be clearly seen but not used. Block every route in or out, cut off their supply, make it abundantly clear that we are in charge.”
“Then?” asked Forest.
“Then find out who’s leading the rebels and…” He shrugged. “Invite them to parley.”
“War is only ever a prelude to talk,” came a voice. A man stood nearby, in neat civilian clothes. A man who Orso had, as far as he was aware, never laid eyes upon before. A nondescript man with curly hair and a length of wood in one hand. He smiled at Orso. “My master would thoroughly approve, Your Highness.”
As a crown prince, Orso was used to forgetting nine-tenths of the people he was introduced to, as well as to total strangers sticking their noses
into his business, and so he remained scrupulously polite. “Pardon me, but I am not sure we have met…?”
“This is Yoru Sulfur,” offered Superior Pike. “A member of the Order of Magi.”
“I was just now struggling to put out a fire in the North when the unmistakable tang of the Union in flames reached my nose.” Sulfur smiled wider. “Never any peace, eh? Never the slightest peace.”
“His Eminence the Arch Lector,” said Pike, “as well as His Majesty your father, were very keen that Master Sulfur should join us.”
“Merely to observe.” Sulfur waved it away as if the favour of the Union’s two most powerful men was nothing to comment on. “And perhaps offer some trifling advice, if I can. As a representative of my master, Bayaz, First of the Magi. Pressing business detains him in the West, but the stability of the Union has ever been a prime concern of his, even so. Stability, stability, he’s always saying. A stable Union means a stable world. This business…” And he shook his head sadly as he looked towards the smoke over Valbeck. “Is quite the opposite. Why, the very first thing they did was burn the bank.”
“I… see,” said Orso. Meaning that he did not see at all. He turned back to Forest, where things made at least a little more sense. “What was I saying?”
“Surround the city, Your Highness.”
“Ah, yes. Proceed!”
Forest gave a stiff salute and the orders rang out, followed by the tramp and jingle as the latest column of the Crown Prince’s Division left the road and fanned out into the fields to begin the encirclement.
“Master Tallow?” said Orso.
The boy crept forward. “Yes, sir, I mean, Your… er…”
“Highness,” threw in Tunny, grinning ever so slightly.
“You’ve been in the city?”
He nodded, those great luminous eyes fixed on Orso.
“And you observed a meeting of these Breakers?”
He nodded again.
“Any notion who’s in charge in there?”
“Risinau, the Superior of the Inquisition. Called himself the Weaver. Seemed like he was leading them, but he talked like a madman. Then there was a woman called Judge.” He gave a little shiver. “But she seemed even madder’n Risinau. Then there was an old fellow. Mulmer. Molmer. Something like that. He seemed… decent, I reckon.”
“Mulmer it is, then, I suppose.” Orso frowned at Tallow. “Have you eaten today? You look bloody famished.”
Tallow blinked.
“You like chicken?”
He slowly nodded.
“Yolk?”
“Your Highness?”
“Go to my cook and get the boy a chicken with… well, with whatever he wants.”
Yolk looked a little sour.
“Sour about that, Yolk? Think the task’s beneath you?”
“Well—”
“Any task I could give is far above you. Get the boy a damn chicken, then I want you and him to go out towards Valbeck under a white flag—have we got a white flag, Tunny?”
Tunny shrugged. “Stick a shirt on a stick, job done.”
“Chicken first, then shirt on a stick, then head up to the nearest barricade and tell them Crown Prince Orso would very much like to speak to Mulmer of the Breakers. Tell them I am ready to negotiate. Tell them I am keen to negotiate. Tell them I feel about negotiation the way a stallion feels about a mare.”
“Yes, Your Highness,” said Yolk, still looking somewhat sour.
“Yes, Your Highness,” said Tallow, his eyes still wide. Narrowing them simply did not appear to be an option for the boy.
Orso stood frowning towards the city as they walked away, one hand on his stomach. “Hildi?” he called.
The girl was sitting cross-legged in her drummer-boy’s uniform, making a chain of daisies. “Little busy here.”
“Get me a chicken, would you?”
“I could eat.”
“Get everyone a chicken, then. Chicken, Master Sulfur?”
“Very kind, Your Highness, but I must keep to a very specific diet.”
“The discipline of the magical arts, eh?”
Sulfur grinned wide, showing two rows of shiny white teeth. “We all must make sacrifices.”
“I suppose so. Never been much good at it, though.”
“Lack of practice, probably,” said Hildi.
Orso snorted up a laugh. “I can hardly deny it. I fear I want everyone to like me, Master Sulfur.”
“We all do, Your Highness, but he who tries to please everyone pleases no one at all.”
“I wish I could deny that, too, but I’ve certainly pleased no one so far.” He looked over at the magus who, aside from the staff, was about the least magical-looking man one could have asked for. “Don’t suppose you could solve all this with… I don’t know… a spell?”
“Magic can level mountains. I have seen it. But there is always a cost, and it rises with each passing year. In my experience, swords offer considerably better value.”
“You speak more like an accountant than a wizard.”
“A sign of the times, Your Highness.”
“Superior Pike? Can I tempt you to chicken?”
The superior did not look pleased by the thought of chicken. Indeed, it was the most Orso could do to stand his ground as the man’s hideously burned face advanced on him. “You mean to treat with the rebels?”
“I do, Superior.” Orso gave a false chuckle. “After all, what harm can talk do?”
“A very great deal. I am not sure His Eminence will approve.”
“Is there anything His Eminence does approve of?” Orso grinned, but Pike’s face remained impassive. Perhaps it was the burns. Perhaps he was thoroughly tickled but physically unable to smile. Perhaps he was chortling away on the inside the whole time. It did not seem likely. “Look, Superior, the wonderful thing about being crown prince is you can talk and wheedle and promise and bluster and everyone has to listen.” He leaned close to murmur in the melted remnants of Pike’s ear. “But you never have the power to actually do anything.”
Pike raised one brow. Or looked as if he would have, had he any to raise. Then he gave the faintest nod, perhaps even a nod of approval, and faded back to confer with Sulfur.
Orso was left alone in the wheatfield with Tunny, the Steadfast Standard resting covered in the crook of one arm.
“What is it, Corporal?”
“I never saw more harm done than by the heroes who couldn’t wait to get started.”
Orso popped open his top button. Uniforms were a great help around the belly but they could get awfully tight at the throat. “Well, if I excel at anything, it’s doing nothing.”
“You know what, Your Highness? I’m starting to think you might make a better-than-average king.”
“So you’re always telling me.”
“Yes.” Tunny had a knowing smirk as he watched the men of the Crown Prince’s Division steadily spread out around the city. “But I never actually meant it before.”
The Battle of Red Hill
“How’s your leg?” asked Rikke.
“Sore,” said Isern, wrinkling her nose as she picked at the stitches with a fingernail, “and somewhat crusty.” She straightened with a sigh. “But sore and crusty is about as good as one could hope for from an arrow wound.”
She stuck two fingers in a pouch and started smearing something on the pink and puckered skin. It was Rikke’s turn to wrinkle her nose. The smell of it was quite impossible to describe. “By the dead,” trying to hold her breath, “what is that?”
Isern started to wind a fresh bandage around her thigh. “Better you don’t know. I might have to spread some on you if you get arrow-pricked, and I wouldn’t want you arguing.” She slipped a pin through the bandage and stood, wincing as she rubbed at her thigh with her thumb, flexing her knee, testing her weight on it. “Knowledge isn’t always a gift, d’you see? Sometimes it’s better we be swaddled in the comforting darkness of ignorance.”
She pushed a pell
et of chagga up behind her lip, then rolled another between finger and thumb and handed it over. Rikke chomped on it, savoured that sour, earthy taste which she’d found so vile when she started chewing it but that now she could never get enough of, and pushed it down behind her lip.
It was cold. No fires in case Stour’s scouts saw them and spoiled the trap, and she’d hardly slept and she was aching and hungry but sick at the same time and bloody hell she felt nervous. Kept fussing with her fingers, fussing at the chagga pellet with her tongue, fussing at the runes around her neck, fussing at the ring through her nose—
“Stop fussing,” said Isern. “Neither of us’ll be fighting.”
“I can feel worried for those who will, can’t I?”
“Meaning your Young Lion?” Isern grinned, tip of her tongue showing through that hole in her teeth. “Can’t spend your whole life fucking, you know.”
“No.” Rikke gave a smoky sigh. “Something to aim for, though.”
“I’ve heard less noble goals, ’tis true.”
The silence stretched. The silence, and the nerves, and somewhere someone started up a song in a deep bass. That one about the Battle in the High Places, where her father laid Bethod low. Old battles. Old victories. She wondered whether some time in the future, folk would sing songs about the Battle of Red Hill, and if they did, who’d be the winners and who the losers.
“When will they get here?” she asked for the hundredth time.
Isern leaned on her spear and frowned off to the east. The sun was rising there, a brilliant crescent over the hills that set the edges of the clouds on fire. The valley bellow was dark still, here or there a glitter on the stream, mist hanging over the trees that marched off to the North. “Could be soon,” mused Isern. “Could be later. Might be they change their mind and don’t come at all.”
A Little Hatred Page 33